There is nothing more fun than pulling a harmless prank on a friend, sibling, or roommate. Prank your friends by covering their car in sticky notes or messing with their hand sanitizer. Alternatively, create a culinary nightmare with Oreo cookies and toothpaste and feed it to your victims. If you want to prank a sibling or roommate, tape a bug cutout to the inside of a lampshade or salt their toothbrush.

Steps

Method1

Inventing Your Own Prank

1

Choose someone to prank. Choose someone that you’re close to that has a similar sense of humor, such as a parent, a teacher, a sibling, or a close friend. Avoid pranking someone that you don’t know very well. They may misunderstand your prank and think that you’re picking on them. Other people to avoid include:

Strangers

A parent that’s stressed out and distracted

The new kid at your school

Someone that you don’t usually get along with

Someone who tends to be sensitive, or easily upset

Someone who has PTSD, anxiety, or another condition that makes it harder for them to calm down

2

Brainstorm ideas. Find a pen and a piece of paper. Choose a comfortable, distraction-free place to sit and think.[1] Next, write down any idea that comes into your head. Don’t worry about whether the idea is good or bad. Instead, focus on writing down as many ideas as possible.

Try a prank that matches their personality. For example, if your best friend loves glitter and doesn't scare easily, then sending her a glitter bomb might make her laugh. Or if your dad loves experimenting with recipes, you could buy a bunch of vegetables that don't need refrigeration and put them in weird places around the house. (He can cook them after he gets a good laugh out of it.)

Avoid a prank that doesn't match their personality or habits. For example, if your mom is often in a hurry in the morning, then you don't want to send her on a scavenger hunt to find her coffee mug. Or if your brother startles easily, you don't want to send him a jump scare video because it might scare him too much.

3

Discard any mean or dangerous ideas. Your prank shouldn’t hurt anyone’s feelings or put anyone in danger.[2] If so, it’s no longer a “harmless” prank. Some examples of dangerous or hurtful situations include:

Ruining a possession that matters a lot to someone

Making someone think that someone or something important to them has been harmed

Involving sharp objects or fire in your prank

Making someone angry by scaring them

Putting them at risk for suffocation or hyperventilation by trapping them

Putting them at risk for injury (for example, putting a bucket of water over a door, only for the bucket to fall and hit them on the head, resulting in a trip to the emergency room)

Making a big mess for them to clean up

4

Choose your best idea. The best prank will be funny, harmless, and realistic to execute. Additionally, the joke should be big enough to be surprising, but not so big that they become suspicious.[3] Choose ideas that:

Prank the person in their comfort zone, so that they’re not suspecting anything

Don’t require too much setup

Will be funny to you and to the person you prank

Won't make a big mess

5

Plan your execution. Now that you’ve invented the perfect prank, make a plan. Carefully outline the plan on a piece of paper. Reread your plan several times, visualizing it as you read. This will help you spot any fatal flaws in your plan. For example:

If your plan involves a lot of balloons, make sure you have time to buy balloons.

If your friend isn’t feeling well, they may call in sick to work or school and miss your prank.

If your prank involves water and it’s cold outside, the water may freeze.

Method2

Playing Tricks on Your Friends

1

Place a “voice activation” sign on an appliance. This prank works especially well if you work with your friends. Bring a toaster or other popular appliance to work and place it in the break room. Next, make a small sign indicating that this state-of-the-art toaster is voice activated. Spend the rest of your day laughing as you hear people yelling at a toaster.

If you want to encourage your friends to use the toaster, put a loaf of bread next to it and tell them to help themselves.

Other small appliances include drip coffee makers, hot plates, and Keurigs.

2

Cover your friend’s car in sticky notes. Visit an office supply depot and buy as many sticky notes as you can carry. Next, cover your friend’s car in a layer of sticky notes, including the windows. Your friend will have to remove hundreds of sticky notes before they can use their car again.[4]

Use colored sticky notes to create a variety of patterns and designs. For example, use green, white, and brown sticky notes to create a Shrek car.

Sticky notes stick best to freshly cleaned cars.

Take responsibility for your mess. After your friend reacts, offer to clean up for them.

3

Replace their hand sanitizer with lubricant. This prank is excellent on friends who always have a bottle of sanitizer in their purse or on their desk. First, purchase a bottle of clear personal lubricant from a pharmacy or grocery store. Next, empty your friend’s bottle of hand sanitizer and fill it with the personal lubricant. When your friend tries to use their sanitizer, they will get greasy and slimy hands instead.

Save the sanitizer in a cup or buy your friend a new bottle before doing this prank. They may become upset if they have to buy more sanitizer themselves.

4

Mail something funny. There are many companies that provide prank mailing services. You can mail your friend a box of glitter, an eggplant, bugs, and more. Do an online search to find the service that best fits your purposes.[5]

If possible, mail the package to your workplace or school so that you can see your friend open it.

5

Advertise for a Chewbacca roar contest. Create flyers advertising a Chewbacca roar contest and place your friend’s phone number at the bottom. Next, place the flyers all around your neighborhood. If you’re lucky, your friend will receive dozens of Chewbacca impression voicemails.[6]

Avoid pulling this prank using someone’s work phone. Their voicemail may fill up and they’ll miss important calls.

Method3

Using Food to Prank Someone

1

Make “candy apples.” First, create a batch of classic candy-apple coating. Next, remove the papery layers from a few medium-sized onions. Push a wooden skewer into each onion to create a handle. Dip each onion in the candy coating and set it on a sheet of wax paper to dry. The onion will perfectly resemble a delicious red candy apple.

Once they cool, casually offer your friends a “candy apple” and watch their reactions as they bite into the onion.

Make sure you don’t serve this prank food to someone with an onion allergy.

2

Make disgustingly cheesy “orange juice.” Purchase a box of dried macaroni and cheese and a small bottle of orange juice. Drink or pour out the orange juice. Next, pour the cheesy powder insert from the box of macaroni and cheese into your empty bottle. Add water and screw the lid back on. Shake the bottle until there are no cheese lumps in the liquid.[7]

Once the bottle is ready, offer it to a friend and watch them gag as they drink it.

Chill the bottle until you’re ready to use it. A warm bottle of orange juice might make your friends suspicious.

3

Create toothpaste Oreos. Purchase a package of Oreo cookies and a tube of toothpaste. Next, carefully pull each cookie sandwich apart and scrape out the icing. Squeeze a dollop of toothpaste on one of the cookies and press them back together. When your friend eats a cookie, they will get a disgustingly minty surprise.[8]

Place the minty cookies on a plate. Next, offer your friends a cookie and watch them gag as they eat it.

If you have suspicious friends, leave a plate of minty Oreos lying around to tempt them. You may not get to watch them eat it, but you’ll hear about it later.

Method4

Pranking Around the House

1

Add salt to their toothbrush. Sprinkle salt over the bristles of your roommate or sibling’s toothbrush. The next time they brush their teeth, their toothpaste will taste salty and disgusting.

Use a small grain sea salt or table salt. Otherwise, they may see the salt grains on their toothbrush and become suspicious.

2

Place a “bug” on the lampshade. This prank is fun to play on people who don't like large bugs. First, print a picture of a large cockroach or another gross insect. Next, cut it out and tape it onto the inside of a lampshade. When your roommate or sibling turns on the lamp, they will see the terrifying silhouette of the large insect and believe that a real bug is inside the lampshade.

Look for images of gross insects to print out on the internet.

Use clear tape to attach the insect cut-out onto the lamp shade.

Don't play this prank if someone with a severe phobia of insects lives in the house. You want to make sure that whoever sees it will be able to calm down afterwards. Otherwise, it's not harmless.

3

Create useless soap. Find a bottle of clear nail polish and a dry bar of soap. Paint several layers of clear nail polish on the soap, allowing it to dry between layers. Next, place the soap in the shower or next to the sink. When your sibling or roommate tries to use it, the soap won’t create any suds at all.

Apply at least four layers of clear nail polish. The more layers you apply, the better this prank will work.

4

Wrap their bed in plastic wrap. Purchase several boxes of clear plastic wrap from your local grocery store. Next, wrap your sibling or roommate’s bed in tight layers of plastic wrap by running the roll around the entire bed frame. When they go to bed, they’ll have to spend several minutes struggling to remove the plastic wrap first.[9]

Try to use a few long pieces instead of many smaller pieces. This will make the wrapping harder to remove.

You can either wrap each pillow and blanket separately or wrap everything together in a tightly sealed package.

First take orange colored paper and cut it into small strips then twist each strip. Next take an empty Cheetos bag, put the twisted orange paper in it, and then seal the Cheetos bag by gluing the open side so that it looks unopened. Give the bag to a family member and they will think it's Cheetos until they open it.

How can I prank an 11-year-old without getting in trouble with my strict parents?

Community Answer

Go into a room and open the door a little. Find some pillows and place them on top of the door. Yell for your victim to come inside (not too loud, but loud enough for them to hear). Watch your victim's funny reaction!

How do I prank someone on April Fools without them knowing it's an April Fools prank?

Community Answer

Do a prank that could be an actual mistake and not a prank. You could pretend to cut yourself, or "accidentally use the wrong ingredients for their food", so they would think it's just an accident and not a real prank.

Video.

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Tips

Make sure that your prank won't end up getting someone else. You want to ensure that you get the right recipient.

Choose your the recipient carefully. If your friend doesn’t have a good sense of humor, it may be better to prank someone else.

Remember a good prank is one you can BOTH laugh about. Mean pranks may be taken seriously by others and may hurt people's feelings.

You can stick a coin under the tap(not all sides!) and water will spray everywhere when your victim turns it on.

Warnings

Choose appropriate times to prank your friend. If they’re stressed out or sad, they may not receive the prank well.

Pranking strangers (e.g., posting a screamer or jump scare video online) is a bad idea because you don't know if they will receive it well or if any of them are very sensitive. If you do an internet prank, keep it mild, or send it via private messages to your friends who you know will react well.

To pull a harmless prank, try covering your friend's car in sticky notes or wrapping their bed in plastic wrap. You can also buy Oreos, replace the filling with white toothpaste, and give them to your friend to eat. If you want to prank a sibling or one of your parents, sprinkle salt on their toothbrush so it tastes gross the next time they brush their teeth. Or you can cover the bar of soap in their shower with several coats of clear nail polish so it doesn't lather when they try to use it. To learn how to prank someone by sending them a funny package in the mail, scroll down!